>> if you have an irate minority, you do very well in the caucus state. >> ron paul answers my questions and your questions from twitter tonight. the piers morgan interview starts now. good evening. tonight the piers morgan interview comes to you from las vegas. i'm at planet hollywood to talk to candidate ron paul. welcome. >> thank you. >> this will sound likeshame less name dropping, but the last time i dined in this restaurant was with sylvester stallone, and the parallel to me is clear. you are the rocky balboa of this campaign. how do you feel about that analogy? >> i have no idea how to respond to that. i hope that's very positive. it sounds like it could be positive. >> what i mean is americans love an underdog. and you remain an underdog, despite this continual, extraordinary support of young people. people still perceive you as an underdog. do you believe like rocky balboa that you could surprise everybody and actually win this race? do you genuinely believe you could become the nominee? >> yeah. obviously, so. and i think the record of this campaign, you know, the republican campaign these last almost 12 months now shows you that a lot of the accompanieds are coming and going. you know, they come in, they peak out, and all of a sudden they're gone. and we did have nine. we're down to four right now. the one characteristic of our campaign is its steady growth. and i saw a little clip the other day on the internet that says, once you become a ron paul supporter, you remain a ron paul supporter. >> and understand you have a ron paul principle, your supporters say, you stick to that principle. and that is certainly a great plus, i think. you look at someone like mitt romney, everybody knows, he changes his minds about lots of issues. i suppose what i would say to you about that is it can be a stick to beat you, in the sense that if you never change your mind about anything, is that, in itself, healthy? >> teem and history helps change your views. i've changed and modified my views on what i think about the death penalty. so it's not overly rigid, but i see it as refinement and growth in developing a philosophy that is a defense of liberty. the concept of liberty has been around in bits and pieces for thousands of years and of course we've had a grand experiment here. and i'm motivated by the fact that i would hate to see it lost and i would like to refine it, pick up the pieces where we left off a while ago and actually improve upon what we've had in the past. >> you are the oldest candidate, and you have been, even when there were nine candidates, yet the one that many say has the most energy, and you have the biggest youth following. what do you put this down to? a, where do you get all this energy from? >> well, you know, i don't know exactly. you know, where does our health come from? there's a lot of things. mental health is important. >> do you have a regime on the campaign? >> yes, and it gets interrupted sometimes on the campaign. i can't quite do it. but historically for 30 or 40 years, however long i can remember, i've had a pretty strict regime and it involves a lot of exercise and also eating habits are very important. >> so what do you do, exercise wise, when you have time? >> okay, when i have time, i would get up in the morning and i want to get outside. i'm sort of -- outside gives me relaxation. soy so i don't want to ride an a bike. and it sort of clears my head. and loosens me up in good health habits. i think can prevent usage of a lot of medications. so i strive for that, but i think my parents might have had a little bit to do with good health. >> what about diet? what do you do for eating and drinking? >> i'm not overly fanatic, with but i watch the white things, the white sugars and although i do eat meat, i think fish is better. but it's not overly radical. but i think fresh vegetables are good. so most of it is probably more common sense than anything i learned in medical school. >> well, you look good. do you think this is part of the reason why the youth are energized by you? they like the fact that you are this guy that sticks to his principles? >> i think that is it, and i think sometimes, they will translate that in, he sticks to his principles about health habits. but i think it's the principles of liberties that are so inviting to young people. i think their minds are more open. i don't think their minds have been cluttered. i don't think they've been forced to accept things and accept the status quo. we live in enera today where the failure of government programs is so blatant. and although i've been doing this for a long time within and we have had a lot of interests in the last five to ten years, it really came to life once the financial crisis, which many of us who have been involved in economics predicted would come, and sort of confirmed it, and people were very uneasy about the future, whether it's here in europe and we're all interconnected now with global trade and global banking. so i think that has, you know, energized the people, because i've been talking differently and warning about these things. >> does it help, also, that you were a child of the great depression. you know, you grew up through the depression and came out the other end. and you saw what it took, with i think, to do that. i was fascinated to read the sure volume of jobs that you did when you were a young man. you did all sorts of stuff. you worked with your father on the dairy, but you did countless jobs. you worked very, very hard. do you see that kind of hard work ethic now in america? and if the answer is no, is that one of the fundamental problems, that that work ethic has einvolved over the years? >> that's a big issue. people ask me hobbit my parents might have had influence on politics. well, they were conservative republicans, but they were more republicans than anything else. but i think where they contributed a lot to my thinking was, it was work ethic. the depression and world war ii. the depression didn't end until after world war ii, because i remember world war ii better than the depression, and actually things got worse, because there was rationing and there were no new cars and all. so the work ethic was very, very important. and i think that had a large impact on me. at the same time, i worked that into a philosophy. but i think -- and i talk a lot about it at my speeches, especially on the college campuses, of not depending on the government, they're not there, they're bankrupt. they try to give everybody a free house and now they don't have jobs and they don't have their houses. >> although i agree with you to a certain degree, i think i take issue when it comes to health care. where you have quite provocative views here. your belief, basically, is is if you can't afford the insurance for medicare or whatever it may be, that you've got to fend for yourself somehow or get your local community to bail you out. am i misrepresenting you or is that basically how you feel? >> yeah, but it's a lot more compassionate than the way it may sound. >> is it, though? >> yeah. because if you see the extent of total socialism, it's not very compassionate. people end up with no care at all. i mean, what happened at the end of the soviet system? everybody had free care, but there was no soviet system. they were totally bankrupt, because they had an empire that failed. and today nobody -- we've had -- i was in medicine when we had no government. and i don't remember the problems as badly as i remember the problems now. >> but what about the -- as we have in britain -- the basic right to health care for every citizen. what is wrong with that as a principle, an ambition to aspire to? >> i think the basic principle is wrong in that you don't have a right to somebody else's life or money. you have a right to your life and you have a right to your liberty and you have a right to keep what you earn. but you don't have a right to take food from somebody else. and you say, well, i'm not going to take it, the government's going to take the food. you don't have a right to somebody else's house, oh, yes, but the government will get the house for me. we who believe in the freedom philosophy believe that you can't use violence to get what you want, but you can't get the government to use violence and force. >> what if you don't have the ability to get your own health care. you have no means to do that. what do the people who mitt romney was dismissive of the other day, and we'll come to that, what do those people do, the most vulnerable parts of society. what do they do? under your presidency, what would they do to get health care? >> you have to understand the difference between an interventionist economy and a socialist economy. if you really want to produce the best medical care and the best prosperity, the largest middle class, you have to do it through freedom. if you do it through redistribution of wealth, you actually reduce the availability. >> let's take a little break. i want to come back and talk to you more about the economy, and also, how you keep america great through tough times like this and what you think of today's jobless figures, which whatever way you look at it, are pretty good news for barack obama. online dating services can get kind of expensive. so to save-money, i found a new way to get my profile out there. check me out. everybody says i've got a friendly disposition and they love my spinach dip. 5 foot ten. still doing a little exploring... on it. my sign is sagittarius, i'm into spanish cheese, my hairline is receding but i'm getting a weave. 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>> let me just read you this quo. this is from jeb hensarling, a republican representative. he said, today is an indication of another failure of this president's policies. 36 months in a row with 8% plus unemployment, which is a ludicrous way of spinning it. how can you say, this is another example of a president getting things wrong on a day when, actually, the official figures, no matter how you dress them up, are positive. isn't the better thing, i suppose the more credible position for republicans to say is, i am encouraged by this, but he should have gone further? >> to me, it's more important that you admit the truth. so if i'm speaking the truth, so we might have to compare figures, but let's assume for a sec that i'm speaking the truth and the 200,000 new jobs was a net benefit. but what i'm saying is we quit counting people, we disavowed them. if i'm speaking the truth, the most important thing is we know the truth. as a matter of fact, you'll probably have a hard time -- you probably haven't heard me in a speech. i do talk about the president a little bit, mainly on attack on civil liberties and maybe not doing enough about the wars. so i'm not in that same people to say, well, the president didn't do enough, it's all the president's fault, because it isn't. he hasn't done anything to come in my direction of going back to a market economy or looking at the balancing the budget, republicans or democrats don't want to cut anything. >> what about mitt romney's comment about he's not concerned about the poor. let's just play this and then i'll get your reaction. >> i'm in this race because i care about americans. i'm not concerned about the very poor. we have a safety net there. if it needs repair, we'll fix it. >> it was a misstatement. i misspoke. i've said something that is similar to that, but quite acceptable for a long time. and when you do i don't know how many thousands of interviews, now and then you may get it wrong, and i misspoke. >> he says now it's a misstatement, but he didn't say that immediately. and it just sounded awful, that, didn't it? for somebody to be aiming to be president to talk about the poor in that way, it seemed callus. >> i don't have probably any agreements with mitt on policies. foreign policy, monetary policy, spending policy, bailout policy. but, you know, i think there was a big issue because of politics, because of the opposition, the demagoguing, the media jumping on this. and actually, i think i ended up defending him more than he defended himself. because i don't believe for a minute that if mitt romney was sitting here, that if he released everything in his heart, and he said, you know what, the truth is, i really don't care about poor people, but that isn't -- i don't believe that. >> what he did say unequivocally is that they wouldn't be a priority. i found that extraordinary. if i was president, which i would never be, because i'm british, the poor would be my absolute priority. would they be yours? >> if that is your number one priority, if you listen to what i've been talking about and understood free market economics, you would say the most important thing you can do is give them a sound currency, limited government, free markets, contract rights, don't bail out anybody, no privilege classes, and that's when the poor would get the benefits. that's when the jobs would come. but this whole fallacy of saying that we have to -- see, i'm concerned about the poor more than anybody, or as much as anybody, but i don't think robbing one group and giving more money to the poor and saying, well, you can have your house, just pay the bills, but he can't do it. so it's a failed policy. it's good intention, but the good intentions don't solve our problems. >> when you have someone like warren buffett, one of the richest, most successful men in history, begging to be taxed more. publicly saying, tax me, tax me. give me money to those who don't have it, what is wrong with that? >> well, let him pay. remember going around -- >> what is wrong with having a tax system which just taxes people like him more? >> well, it destroys the economy if you just -- >> it doesn't. >> let him pay. >> there is little evidence that raising taxation for the very rich ever destroys an economy. it doesn't. >> well, that i disagree with. >> historically, it hasn't. >> i disagree, because government, what are they going to do with the money? are they going to subsidize the housing industry again and have that thing blow up -- are they going to start another war? that's why they need the money. >> the problem with the housing industry wasn't that poor people got housing. it was that greedy bankers and financial institutions brought in the subprime mortgage scams, which preyed on people who didn't understand the system. that's what happened. >> but where would the speculation come from if you donate have easy credit? where'd the money come from? -- from savings, they wouldn't have done it. >> i agree with personal responsibility. all the middle classes that people are rushing to support, i think overmaxed their credit cards, spent money they didn't have, and are trying to absolve themselves, in many cases, from personal responsibility. but i come back to this. when mitt romney said what he said about, i'm not concerned with the poor, i really felt offended, for everybody in america. i was like, you've got to have a president -- >> i think -- >> you've got to have a president who prioritizes the poor, haven't you? >> now, if i'd have been confronted with that, the answer would have been different. but the answer would have been different than your answer. you'd want more government and more spending. i would have said, that is my deep concern. if you are a true humanitarian, if you care about the poor people, and if you care about not shrinking the middle class, like's going on right now, we're getting more poor shrinking of the middle class, you cannot do it without looking at the monetary policy. if you don't do anything, exclude everything else, but you just depreciate the currency, the middle class gets wiped out. if you're on the receiving end, the banks, the corporations, they get tremendous benefit. the wealth is automatically transferred from the middle class, the poor get poorer, and the wealthy get wealthier. then when the bailouts come, they even benefit more in the bad debt, which should have been liquidated, is dumped on the people. >> the flip side of the bailout argument is when you look at the car industry, barack obama did bailout the car industry, and now they're doing very well. so bailouts can work, indisputably. >> well, you're making an assumption it wouldn't have worked with honest bailouts. it's an honest bailout. >> you don't know, it's chicken and the egg, isn't it? >> no, it isn't. if you had an honest bail, the people who own those bonds would have been protected. but he turned the ownership over to the unions. that's not fair. he used force to transfer -- he was wrong to break the contracts. governments are there to enforce contracts, not to adjust the contracts for the benefit of their political constituency. >> even if it works? >> especially if it works. if a criminal robs a bank and it works, you don't justify it by the robbing of the bank. >> let's take a break, come back and talk foreign policy, and specifically the threat of war with iran. i'm a marathon runner, in absolute perfect physical condition and